Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beware what you set your heart upon. For it shall surely be yours.

A man’s style is his mind’s voice. Wooden minds, wooden voices.

See only that thou work and thou canst not escape the reward.

The line of beauty is the line of perfect economy.

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

A jest often decides matters of importance more effectual and happily than seriousness.

I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also.

Extended empires are like expanded gold, exchanging solid strength for feeble splendor.

The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods.

Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they’re yours.

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

When you’re drowning, you don’t say ‘I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me drowning and come and help me,’ you just scream.

Do the wise thing and the kind thing too, and make the best of us and not the worst.

We should always have three friends in our lives-one who walks ahead who we look up to and follow; one who walks beside us, who is with us every step of our journey; and then, one who we reach back for and bring along after we’ve cleared the way.

The city is recruited from the country.

The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

We falsely attribute to men a determined character, putting together all their yesterdays and averaging them, we presume we know them. Pity the man who has character to support, it is worse than a large family, he is the silent poor indeed.

A private Life is to be preferred; the Honor and Gain of publick Posts, bearing no proportion with the Comfort of it

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.